My friend B, in Thailand, posted his setup this morning and I had to smile, because I recognized every inch of it. Quick backstory: he's the builder/coder, I'm the courses-and-websites guy; we've known each other years. He'd built a little agent to help him read The Little Prince in Thai, I commented, and sent him the Quiet AI site. He went and actually read the gits — came back impressed. We got into it and I shared the principles I build by for this stuff — Jake Van Clief's ICM paper, basically, which I've been living inside for a while. His post: eight agents on his home machine, all on one Claude Code subscription. Diane (PM), Mort (accountant), Pam (admin), Chad (coach), Ingrid (PA), Zoey (content), Kru Nok (Thai teacher) — and Preston, the Chief of Staff, running the lot, able to spin up or rewrite any of them. Each with its own skills, MCPs, and a long-term Obsidian memory. He built them as side agents in Claude Code (the screenshot was great). The bit I loved: he writes about "Context Fetching" — the grind of digging up which files, which steps, in which order, before any real task even starts. His monthly finance close used to eat hours; now Mort runs it in ~30 min because the steps live in Mort, not his head ("the tireless robotic chairman," he called him). And when he wanted a dev on the team, he didn't crack open the source folder to hand-build an agent. He asked Preston to hire one — folder, skills, MCPs, prior-project context, all stood up by the Chief of Staff. The new dev, in his words: "anonymous, not yet born, but with a bright future on the team." I recognized all of it because it's the architecture I run. Cast of roles, one conductor, shared memory, and the hire-don't-build instinct. He came at it from the front end; I came up from the repo. Two roads, same shape — genuinely one of the more exciting things I've seen this year. The field's waking up and people are landing on real structure by feel. Here's what I keep turning over, though, and it's a question about my own build as much as his.

With this community growing at such a crazy rate and new people coming in every day, and with all the other AI info in the world right now, I figured I'd make an analogy to explain ICM in the simplest terms... See the PDF for the static analogy and the HTML which is a fun interactive way to learn ICM 😁 ---- All of this was created using ICM [and Anthropics generous fable 5 allowance] 😅